More than 20 years after Michael Jordan won his last championship, the NBA legend’s game-worn Air Jordan from 1985 is up for sale – after being salvaged from a Milwaukee mall under construction — and the single shoe is expected to fetch up to $20,000.

Larry Awe, maintenance chief at the Capitol Court Mall before it was demolished, found the shoe with MJ’s signature on it in a storage room and recognized it from when it was displayed at the sports apparel store Playmakers, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported.

Awe and his future son-in-law Donald Griffin put the single sneaker up for sale through Heritage Auctions, which believes it will fetch $20,000 despite the starting bid of $5,000.

As of Tuesday afternoon, the the bidding was up to $8,500 for the slightly faded, size-13 shoe – inscribed with the message, “My Very Best.”

“We’d walk through the mall quite a bit,” said Awe, 67, who worked in maintenance at the mall for 30 years.

“I was a big basketball fan, and the biggest crowd I ever saw (in the mall) was when new shoes were displayed. ‘Look at the size of those!’ (onlookers would say),” he told the paper.

Awe said he recognized the shoe as Jordan’s as soon as he saw it:

“I saw the box and said, ‘This isn’t going to the dump,’” Awe said.

Chris Nerat, consignment director at Heritage Auctions, said: “It was almost like a buried treasure.

“Larry’s had it in his basement for 17 years and it happens to be what I consider and what Heritage considers the most significant Air Jordan shoe in existence, and I don’t think we’re overexaggerating.”

The one glitch is that former Playmakers owner Ron Tesmer believes he is the rightful owner of the Air Jordan.

Heritage Auctions

“I bought a big Plexiglas encasement and put the shoes in there against the wall and wrote up a little thing underneath the shoes, saying what size they were,” Tesmer said.

When he left the business, Tesmer said he packed up some of his favorites — Jordan, Larry Bird, Dr. J, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Shaq — and placed them in a box in a storage room.

But when he came back into the room at one point, the box was gone.

“I had kind of written them off and didn’t think they’d show up again,” Tesmer said. “Twenty years later, now suddenly they’re there.”

Awe said he had no idea how the box ended up being discarded, but he didn’t find the shoes until 2001 during the mall’s demolition.

The shoe up for auction bears a stamp that indicates it was created Nov. 8, 1984.

On Feb. 17, 1985, the Chicago Bulls’ 22-year-old rookie scored 26 points in a 125-105 loss to the Bucks at the MECCA – as he wore a pair of Air Jordan Ones with a black “swoosh” and red laces.

“Michael Jordan collectibles have never been hotter,” Nerat said. “The 1980s was by far the best era (of the NBA), and I don’t think you can even argue that. Everyone still calls him the GOAT (Greatest of All Time), because I think he is. Game-worn Michael Jordan items are at a high, and I expect this to set records.”

In fiscal 2018, Nike revenue from the Jordan line hit nearly $2.9 billion — part of it coming from buyers who weren’t alive during his last title run, according to the LA Times.